Session: 02-10-01: Sustainable Design

Paper Number: 146537

146537 - From Principles to Practice: Exploring the Product Design Pathways for a Circular Economy 

A circular economy moves from the current linear model of production and consumption, i.e., the take-make-use-dispose model, to one that uses resources efficiently, avoids pollution, and creates sustainability triple bottom line (i.e., economic, environmental, and social) benefits. This calls for actions that facilitate resource recovery through closed-loops, extend the effective use-life of resources, and improve the productivity of resource utilization in the economy. Product design is vital to this transition, as it sets the limits and possibilities for future activities throughout the entire life cycle. Such a transition necessitates a comprehensive transformation of current design practices. Therefore, designers will need to design products that effectively fit into and facilitate multifaceted circular economic systems, a practice known as circular product design. Circular product design principles guide designers in gaining interdisciplinary and life cycle perspectives to navigate emerging challenges and unique opportunities in operationalizing a circular economy.

This paper presents a set of critical circular product design principles that cut across the product life cycle. It draws from a comprehensive list of circular product design principles being developed through a systematic literature review and integrated into an upcoming standard by ASTM International’s E60.13 Subcommittee on Sustainable Manufacturing. The full list consists of design principles that guide a wide range of activities, including minimizing material needs, prioritizing secondary and renewable resources, specifying efficient manufacturing processes, enhancing products’ physical and emotional durability, maximizing value recovery at end-of-life, and aligning and promoting circular systems. From this list a subset of concepts cut across different life cycle phases, including information sharing, disassembly, dematerialization, durability, and sustainability impact assessment. The crosscutting concepts can help designers understand ways to most effectively practice circular product design by recognizing how the application of said principles impacts and fulfills the stakeholders’ needs across the life cycle, where stakeholders may include upstream raw material and component suppliers, manufacturers, users, maintenance service providers, remanufacturers, and recyclers. Furthermore, it allows product designers to assess possible tradeoffs and synergies between circular product design principles in the context of a specific product life cycle. This understanding helps establish a system focus necessary for circular product design to expand beyond the traditional product-centric approach to include responsible consumption and recovery. Additionally, the paper discusses significant challenges to implementing circular product design, such as conflicting design principles, limitations in designer scope, uncertainties regarding the future, and challenges in circularity evaluations. Furthermore, the paper highlights promising opportunities for advancing circular product design, such as developing standards, compatibility with existing design methodologies, and expanding the designer’s role. This exploration contributes to a deeper understanding of circular product design. It helps identify how to effectively integrate and establish sustainable design practices that align with the principles of a circular economy and will guide the development of new standards.

Presenting Author: Vincenzo Ferrero National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Presenting Author Biography: Vincenzo Ferrero received his Ph.D. from the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Currently, he is a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). His research addresses strategies toward data-driven product design, applied data knowledge synthesis, and data-driven fulfillment of Design-for-X objectives. His research aims to enhance design and manufacturing approaches with machine learning and data mining methods, with a particular interest in bridging Digital Twins and Circular Economy concepts. His background in data knowledge navigation, life cycle engineering, and machine learning has motivated collaborations across topics including data-driven CAD, assembly-function knowledge graphs and algorithms, automated functional modeling, and sustainable design tool development.

Authors:

Buddhika Hapuwatte National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Noah Last National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Sami Karsli Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne
Gaurav Aher Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Aarhus University
Kc Morris National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Vincenzo Ferrero National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)